Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. Reducing heart disease will improve the health of the population in general.
Heart disease has a number of facets including: coronary artery distress; abnormal heart rhythms; heart failure; heart valve disease; congenital heart disease; cardiomyopathy; and pericarditis. Coronary artery distress, or hardening of the arteries, deprives the heart of oxygen and nutrients. Abnormal heart rhythms are irregular, or abnormal, heart beat patterns, or arrhythmia. Heart failure occurs when the heart does not pump as it should. Heart valve disease occurs when a heart valve does not work correctly. Congenital heart disease is a defect in one or more structures of the heart or blood vessels that occur before birth. Cardiomyopathy is a disease of the heart muscle itself. Pericarditis is an inflammation of the lining that surrounds the heart.
Current medical advice to improve heart health includes: quitting smoking, lowering cholesterol levels, controlling high blood pressure, becoming more active, eating right, achieving and maintaining a healthy weight, managing stress and anger, and controlling diabetes.
All of these methods of prevention are arduous, time consuming and many times costly. Treating heart disease may include extensive medication, which also can be time consuming, expensive and have dangerous side effects. Ultimately, life threatening surgery may prove to be necessary.
Therefore, there is a continuing, demonstrated need to enhance cardiac function using compositions that are therapeutic but have few or preferrably virtually no side effects.
Inflammation-related disorders are characterized by a local or systemic, acute or chronic inflammation. Examples include inflammatory dermatoses, inflammatory bowel diseases, hypersensitivity lung diseases, asthma, and allergic rhinitis. Further, examples may include autoimmune diseases, acute and chronic inflammatory diseases, Sjogren's syndrome, human immunodeficiency virus infection, cancer, and tumor metastasis.
Modern anti-inflammatory agents are represented by two major groups: steroid and non-steroid pharmaceutical preparations. Despite the evident anti-inflammatory activity of either preparation, there are several limitations. For instance, a long-term application may cause unfavourable side effects, such as a damage of the gastrointestinal tract, i.e. nausea, vomiting, and stomach ulcer.
Moreover, these anti-inflammatory preparations can cause dysfunctions of the liver and kidney as well as bleedings, leukopenia to the extent of agranulocytosis, anemia. Further, side effects of a long-term administration of anti-inflammatory agents may include changes in the central nervous system, such as giddiness, headaches, excitation, insomnia, fatigability, edema. These factors limit the application of both steroid and non-steroid preparations in practical medicine. Thus, there is a current need for alternative low-toxic anti-inflammatory preparations.
While advances in early detection and adjuvant therapy for breast cancer have had a favorable impact on patient survival in general, patients who develop advanced metastatic breast cancer face a less favorable prognosis. Commonly used hormonal and chemotherapeutic agents can lead to transient regression of tumors and can also palliate symptoms related to cancer. However, these treatments are often accompanied by toxicities and intolerable side effects and eventually become ineffective in controlling advanced stage breast cancer and its symptoms. Improvements in survival are modest, even with newer targeted biological agents. Moreover, in most metastatic cancers resistance to available conventional treatment ultimately develops or excessive side effects are seen with conventional therapies.
Therefore, there is a need for therapies for treatment of patients having metastatic cancers. There is also a need for therapies with reduced, and more specifically minimal, toxicity for patients having metastatic cancers. In particular, there is a need for novel therapies with relatively low toxicity for the treatment of metastatic solid tumors, such as epithelial tumors, and more particularly breast and ovarian cancers.
Free radicals have come to be appreciated for their importance to human health and disease. Many common and life-threatening diseases, including atherosclerosis, cancer, and aging, may have free radical reactions as an underlying mechanism of injury. One of the most common types of radicals is the reactive oxygen species (ROS). These are the products of normal cell respiration and metabolism and are generally regulated by cellular defense systems present in the body. Such cellular defense systems reduce the amount of damage that free and reactive species radicals may cause by scavenging free radicals or enzymatically converting the free radicals to less toxic chemical species, thereby serving a physiological role as antioxidants.
Non-enzymatic antioxidants can react with free radicals directly and self-oxidized (therefore no longer available to quench free radicals); or one antioxidant may act as a reducing agent and another antioxidant oxidized in cyclical fashion (e.g., the interaction of ascorbic acid and alpha-tocopherol). Other non-enzymatic free radical scavengers have been used experimentally with varying results (e.g. mannitol, PBS, etc.); their clinical use is severely limited due to their toxicities. Other synthetic antioxidants, e.g., BHA (butylated hydroxy anisole), BHT (butylated hydroxy toluene) and NDGA (nordihydro guaiaretic acid) may cause allergic reactions. These agents may also cause oncogenesis due to their strong toxicity in the body, and be easily disrupted by heat due to temperature sensitivity. Therefore, there is a need for developing novel compositions therapeutically effective as antioxidants.
Diabetes mellitus is a worldwide health threat of increasing magnitude, and is considered a major health risk both in developed and in developing countries. Type II diabetes accounts for the vast majority of the cases involving diabetes and it is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. It appears that the major contributing factor to the incidence of Type II diabetes is being overweight. In the United States alone, it is estimated that over 17.6 million individuals have been diagnosed as having diabetes. It is estimated that an additional 5.7 million individuals are unaware they have diabetes. Moreover, there are about 57 million Americans who are considered pre-diabetic.
Type II diabetes is also known as non-insulin dependent diabetes. It generally manifests itself as an inability to adequately regulate blood-glucose levels. This is as opposed to Type I diabetes which is characterized by defects in pancreatic production of insulin. In other words, it appears that Type II sufferers suffer from too little insulin or insulin resistance. The factors that have been identified in contributing to these Type II factors include one or more of obesity, genetic background, age, diet, and blood chemistry. Type II is frequently called adult onset because diet is a factor, but it can arise at virtually any age.
The results of diabetes Type II cause glucose levels to rise in the blood and urine. These increases, in turn, can cause hunger, urination, thirst and metabolism related issues. If the condition is not treated, the most common serious results include: heart disease, kidney disease, and blindness. Several treatments are currently being used. Because obesity is frequently a causal agent in diabetes, diet and exercise are usually a front line defense. Therapeutic agents are also used as a second line of defense, including use of insulin or pharmaceuticals that reduce blood and urine levels of glucose.
Several drugs are in current use for diabetes Type II, including insulin segretagogues, glucose lowering effectors, GLP-1 analogs, DPPIV, activators of the peroxisome proliferator activated receptor-gamma and alpha-glucosidase inhibitors. Because these current treatments have side effects, there remains a need for alternative therapies to treat type II diabetes.
A combination of risk factors or clinical conditions that occur together more often than by a mere chance that results in cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes mellitus have become known as the “metabolic syndrome.” These clinical conditions include, but are not limited to, raised blood pressure, dyslipidemia (raised triglycerides and lowered high-density lipoprotein cholesterol), raised fasting glucose, and central obesity.
Metabolic syndrome is frequently associated with, or strongly suggests, prognosis or predicts development of a constellation of co-morbidity including diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, vascular disease, chronic heart failure and chronic kidney disease. Metabolic syndrome is also frequently described as the underlying cause of serious cardiorenal diseases such as hypertension, coronary artery disease, vascular disease, chronic heart failure and chronic kidney disease. In addition, metabolic syndrome can also cause organ fibrosis (e.g., heart, lung and kidney).
Therefore, there is a need for a therapeutic treatment of metabolic syndrome or clinical conditions associated with metabolic syndrome to ameliorate or prevent these diseases